Items tagged with Flash

Although NVMe PCI Express solid state drives are all the rage as of late, due to their relatively strong performance and inherent feature benefits, manufacturers continue to tune and refine their SATA based offerings as well. Case in point: the brand new OCZ VX500 series solid state drives we’ll be showing you here today. The OCZ VX500 series targets the mainstream computing segment and initially consists of a quartet of 2.5mm SATA SSDs, packing all, in-house, Toshiba made technology. The hook is, even though these new drives are priced aggressively, they eschew less expensive TLC NAND in favor...Read more...

Flash's days on the web are numbered. That's been evident for the past couple of years as the anti-Flash movement has gained steam. Little by little, software developers and online services have been removing Flash support from their products, and starting in August, you can count Firefox among them. Well, partially anyway. Firefox isn't getting rid of Flash altogether, but the browser will begin blocking certain Flash content that Mozilla feels is not essential to the user experience. The decision to crack down on Flash plugins is one of several things Mozilla has planned to ultimately bring Firefox...Read more...

Adobe recently published a security advisory APSA16-03, which details a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player version 21.0.0.242 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Chrome OS. This comes after a patch for a zero day exploit was released in early April. Adobe believes the attackers are a group called “ScarCruft”. ScarCruft is a relatively recently APT group that has launched attacks in countries such as Russia, Nepal, South Korea, China, India, Kuwait, and Romania. The group recently has taken advantage of two Adobe Flash and one Microsoft Internet Explorer exploits. ScarCruft...Read more...

It’s safe to say that Adobe Flash is one of the most disliked pieces of software in the modern computing era. What started off as an innovative way for users to experience interactive content and simple online games has transformed into a resource hog and significant security risk. Software vendors have taken extreme measures to scale back support for the plugin and Adobe itself has announced that Flash will soon be on the chopping block. This week, we’re learning that Google is taking further steps to ensure Flash’s demise. Starting in the fourth quarter, Google Chrome will default to HTML5 instead...Read more...

It’s been a rough week for Adobe and its Flash plugin. This week, Microsoft announced that it is hitting the pause button on unnecessary and excessive Flash content on webpages, and now we’re learning that Adobe had to scramble to patch up yet another zero-day exploit in Flash. This latest exploit is especially nasty as it uses a security hole found within Flash to allow nefarious parties to infiltrate Windows 10 machines and install ransomware. As we’ve seen by recent ransomware outbreaks at hospitals around the country, this is serious business. The exploit was initially discovered by Trend Micro...Read more...

After major web browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox decided to push Flash further into irrelevancy, Adobe finally saw the writing on the wall and announced that Flash would be put out to pasture. The internet rejoiced at the news, but it will still be quite a while before we are completely rid of the resource hogging and battery draining scourge that has haunted us for years. To that end, Microsoft is trying to at least make the transition a bit easier to bear with the announcement that Windows 10’s Edge browser will gain the ability to “intelligently auto-pause” Flash content that...Read more...

Solid State Storage continues to come down in cost and scale higher in speed and density. Though spinning hard disk media will likely have a place at least in the data center perhaps for generations to come, SSDs are making great strides, driving toward cost parity with HDDs with each new generation of product, while offering orders of magnitude performance gains and even higher reliability in many applications. One of the biggest names in Flash storage is Samsung, from their consumer grade SSD 950 Pro and 850 EVO lines to the squarely enterprise-targeted product the company has announced for volume...Read more...

Little by little, the web is transitioning to a Flash-free experience. HTML5 has emerged as the popular replacement for Flash content, though there are still scores of web ads out there that still use Adobe's Flash Player. That's about to change—at the end of June, Google will no longer accept new Flash-based ads on its ad networks."Starting June 30, 2016, display ads built in Flash can no longer be uploaded in into AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketeing," Google's AdWords division stated in a Google+ post. "Starting January 2nd, 2017, display ads in the Flash format can no longer run on the...Read more...

2015 has proven to be a massive year for Adobe's Flash plugin, but for all the wrong reasons. Flash is already infamous for being one of the most vulnerable pieces of software on the planet, but in 2015, 316 bugs were found and squashed. That comes out to about 6 bugs per week for a piece of software that's used by the vast majority of notebook and desktop users. What's most impressive about the sheer number of bugs Flash has is the fact that ultimately, we're dealing with a mere plugin here, not a massive software package. While Flash was once considered "cool", a de facto choice for Web animation,...Read more...

As if Adobe's Flash Player needed another nail in its coffin, it nevertheless received yet another one this weekend from Facebook. The world's largest social playground announced that it recently flipped the switch over to HTML5 to be the default video player for videos on its website, and that includes the ones that appear in its News Feed. "From development velocity to accessibility features, HTML5 offers a lot of benefits. Moving to HTML5 best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs," Facebook stated in a blog post. You could see...Read more...

We’ve been saying it for years: Adobe needs to go ahead and kill Flash. Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs called for Flash’s demise five years ago and at the time, it seemed like an impossibility. But after a half decade of increasing security exploits and performance degradation in even the most powerful PCs, the Internet has quite effectively turned its back on Flash. Companies like Amazon, Google and Firefox have all given Flash the cold shoulder in recent months and the lapses in security show no signs of slowing down. Adobe has finally gotten the hint and is retiring the Flash brand. “Flash has played...Read more...

At this point, we are no longer surprised that Adobe Flash is being used as an easy vector to exploit computers and entire network. Back in the day, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs trashed Adobe Flash, calling it buggy, full of security holes and detrimental to the battery life of mobile devices. Five years later, Flash is still with us and it is still wreaking havoc on all three of those fronts. The latest Flash vulnerability was revealed this week, and it affects ALL version of the software — yes, even version 19.0.0.207, which was released on Tuesday. The exploit, which is labeled CVE-2015-7645,...Read more...

The security gurus at Trend Micro believe that the cyber attackers behind Pawn Storm are performing their dirty deeds by way of a new zero-day vulnerability in none other than Adobe's Flash platform. Shocking that Flash is at the root of it all, isn't it? This is where we all feign surprise, sarcastically of course.In case you're not familiar, Pawn Storm is the name of a cyber espionage campaign that's had high profile targets in its sights. Trend Micro also says that Pawn Storm represents the first use of a Java zero-day that it's seen in the last couple of years, with the affected vulnerability...Read more...

Today, Intel is taking the wraps off new NVMe PCI Express Solid State Drives, which are the first products with these high speed interfaces that the company has launched specifically for the enthusiast computing and workstation crowds. Historically, Intel's PCI Express-based offerings, like the SSD DC P3700 Series, have been squarely targeted for datacenter or enterprise applications, with price tags to match. However, today Intel is throwing performance enthusiasts another bone with the launch of the Intel SSD 750 series. We've historically been big on PCI Express SSDs here, because they get around...Read more...